No excuseS: Take control of your time in 2016

No Excuses: Take Control Of Your Time In 2016

by BRIAN NORUSIS, Vice President, e-Builder | Jan 15, 2016

“It matters not how strait the gate,

How charged with punishments the scroll,

I am the master of my fate:

I am the captain of my soul.”

My favorite poem is Invictus, by William Ernest Henley, from which the above excerpt is taken. It was written by a man whose childhood was fraught with poverty and written soon after his leg was amputated due to tuberculosis. I love this poem because it stands in contrast to why most of us, and our teams fail – excuses. The fact is, everything is impossible until it’s done. And everything else is just an excuse, which of course is the only obstacle to success.

Excuses can fall into various buckets.  Here are some examples:

1. Time-Based – Sure, there are demands on our time, unless you are a recluse. But success is about prioritization. Instead of saying, “I didn’t have time to get to it”, or “there aren’t enough hours in the day”, why not say “I chose to not do it now”, or “I deemed something else more important”? Time is, in fact, a finite commodity. But we control how it’s spent;

2. Complexity-Based – Tom Hanks said, “If it wasn’t hard, everyone would do it. It’s the hard that makes it great”. Love that quote! If you are going to control your time, then why not do something great? Simple is so easy that anyone can do it;

3. People-Based – People put demands on us all the time be it family, clients, colleagues. If others yield so much control over us that we cannot be successful, then we deserve to not be successful.   We can’t control how others act but we can control how we react.

You can come up with more but you get the point. It is human nature to point blame externally for failure and to applaud ourselves for success. But this philosophy allows mediocrity to be acceptable and failure to reign supreme. Success comes from the recognition that we are solely responsible for our own failures and that we create our own luck. 

Our ability to rationalize excuses away as the normal course of business is why goals aren’t hit, bonuses fall short, promotions don’t come, etc.

The only difference between an obstacle and an inconvenience is our perception. So, let's all eradicate excuses together in 2016!

Based in Fort Lauderdale FL, the author is VP of Customer Success for e-Builder. He has more than 15 years of software implementation and integration experience. Before joining e-Builder, he was responsible for key software implementations at Alltel Communications, then the fifth largest wireless provider in the U.S. He can be reached via e-mail at: bnorusis@e-builder.net. This blog first appeared here.